Jazzpunk Review

This game has a 50/50 chance of being great, although there's only a 10% chance of that

There are a number of good comedy videogames around, but there is one type of comedy games have never (to my knowledge) attempted and that’s the type pioneered by the team of Zucker Abrahams Zucker in Airplane! and The Naked Gun: deadpan comedy. That’s crazy happenings or baffling lines followed by characters treating them as the most normal thing in the world. No punch line, no zingers, just pure parody. It’s a hard thing to pull off, so much so we haven’t really seen a film of its type since Hot Shots: Part Deux. Necrophone Games’ Jazzpunk is nevertheless attempting to fill that creamy void. Good luck, we’re all counting on you.

If you can work out what’s going on in Jazzpunk without venturing to the Steam description or watching the trailer, well done. After gaming’s most psychedelic and headache-inducing intro you’re put in the cyber-shoes of Polyblank, an agent for a shady moustached director called “The Director”. He sends you on missions from his office in an airport, including infiltrating a Russian consulate, stealing from a cowboy in a sushi restaurant, and having a nice holiday. There’s more going on then it seems, but you won’t care because you just clicked a Russian bush and it told you that it was a political prisoner or discovered a smoking pie wearing a beret.

The Director. Will he talk in a drunk British accent the entire game? Yes!

You can ignore the missions, because that’s not what Jazzpunk is about except as a means to an end. It’s about exploring the environments and seeing what crazy stuff you can uncover, and fortunately Necrophone have packed in a lot of crazy stuff. At the start of each mission area you get some Splinter Cell-parodying floating text (that you can occasionally shatter by walking into it) telling you your goal and pointing you in the right direction, but you can turn right around and explore instead. The areas aren’t gigantic but feel packed with little details and characters to talk to and interact with, and the cute stylised graphics only add to the humour.

The jokes come thick and fast, with every interactive item (and there are many) offering at least a smile and often a guffaw. They range from the outrageously silly to the outrageously clever. There’s even a surprisingly large amount of parody minigames hidden in the strangest of places. My personal favourites include a pizza survival horror and the impressive “Wedding Quake”, a matrimony-based arena shooter. Surprise is the key to most of the jokes and you’ll be desperate to talk to people about many of the gags you found, but please don’t unless they’re playing Jazzpunk too. If you’re looking for a good hilarious exploration game this is the best since Virtual Springfield.

Of course you are, little frogger

Much like The Stanley Parable it becomes increasingly hard to talk about Jazzpunk without spoiling too much, as both are first-person games without any real gameplay other than exploring the environment and the use of comedy to comment on the very nature of what a game is. Jazzpunk doesn’t attempt anything quite as mind-blowing as The Stanley Parable as you’re really just there to have a good laugh, but it does get quite clever. For example there are many side quests dotted around the areas but you quickly realise that you get absolutely no reward for doing them, even when they promise one later in the game (which never comes). You’re literally just in it to have fun, which is almost a radical concept when you’re dealing with a first-person spy-exploration game.

Despite being extremely fun and well worth playing just for the laughs, there are a few big problems with Jazzpunk. The first will hopefully be fixed soon if not already but as we can’t always rely on that I have to point it out, and that’s that the game is amazingly buggy. There were times that I got outright stuck, either on scenery, an interactive object, or in one case a room where the door doesn’t open from the inside. In all of these I had to reload an earlier save to proceed, and since Jazzpunk is an adventure game where you can’t die and there are no autosaves at all my saved file as you can imagine was quite far back (halfway through the previous mission for example). The second is that there is absolutely no challenge here. While styled as an adventure game puzzles are basic if there at all, so other than exploration and bugs there is nothing to stop you cruising through the game without impediment. Which brings me to the final problem.

One of the more subtle gags

It’s interesting that I reviewed Jazzpunk alongside Octodad: Dadliest Catch because they share a few interesting similarities. They’re both well written to be extremely funny, they’re both games I highly recommend you buy and play at some point, and they’re both incredibly short. I criticised Octodad for taking me around three hours. Jazzpunk took me two hours, including the time it took me to replay several large sections because of the aforementioned bugs. As I write this Necrophone and Adult Swim have not announced the price for the game, but if it’s more than £10/$15 I say forget it until it’s on sale. I utterly loved my time playing the game but while Octodad could have worn out its premise with a longer game Jazzpunk could easily have had several other missions (airport! Police precinct! I loved you in Wall Street!) so I’m disappointed we only got a handful.

Nevertheless, if you like the sound of a strange Naked Gun/Monty Python-inspired robot-filled adventure/exploration game jam-packed with laughs you should get Jazzpunk as soon as possible. In some ways a more freeform version of those old children’s CD-ROM games where you’d click on parts of a picture and something amusing would happen, Jazzpunk is also surprisingly good for kids too since it’s just about exploring and finding silly things with nothing really offensive happening. Adults will appreciate the more clever references and gags though. In fact I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t like this game, but while I’m excited for the internet to get at it so I can find out what I missed, at two hours long many people might find it hard to justify a purchase. Just keep the meter running, I’ll be right back.

JAZZPUNK VERDICT

Nevertheless, if you like the sound of a strange Naked Gun/Monty Python-inspired robot-filled adventure/exploration game jam-packed with laughs you should get Jazzpunk as soon as possible. In some ways a more freeform version of those old children’s CD-ROM games where you’d click on parts of a picture and something amusing would happen, Jazzpunk is also surprisingly good for kids too since it’s just about exploring and finding silly things with nothing really offensive happening. Adults will appreciate the more clever references and gags though. In fact I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t like this game, but while I’m excited for the internet to get at it so I can find out what I missed, at two hours long many people might find it hard to justify a purchase. Just keep the meter running, I’ll be right back.